It really is remarkable that a profession—a higher calling, they claim—described as aiding the destitute and suffering ends up attracting and protecting such monsters. It's easy to be coldly cynical towards it all—to just condemn religion and/or institutions—but the disconnect between purported ideals and actions is hard to understand (for me, at any rate). How did/do these people rationalize their lives and block out their consciences?
It really is remarkable that a profession—a higher calling, they claim—described as aiding the destitute and suffering ends up attracting and protecting such monsters. It's easy to be coldly cynical towards it all—to just condemn religion and/or institutions—but the disconnect between purported ideals and actions is hard to understand (for me, at any rate). How did/do these people rationalize their lives and block out their consciences?
I can't read that without being overcome with an intensely profound sadness.
I wonder if there is something about this sort of profession, calling, situation whatever you want to call it that draws the worst people possible to it. Maybe not in a conscious way but something inside them that sees the opportunities to act out their worst impulses.
It really is remarkable that a profession—a higher calling, they claim—described as aiding the destitute and suffering ends up attracting and protecting such monsters. It's easy to be coldly cynical towards it all—to just condemn religion and/or institutions—but the disconnect between purported ideals and actions is hard to understand (for me, at any rate). How did/do these people rationalize their lives and block out their consciences?
I can't read that without being overcome with an intensely profound sadness.
I wonder if there is something about this sort of profession, calling, situation whatever you want to call it that draws the worst people possible to it. Maybe not in a conscious way but something inside them that sees the opportunities to act out their worst impulses.
Perhaps, but that heightens the perversity of the job description attracting and endorsing the complete opposite kind of individual. I lean more to the idea that institutions do that to people, with the more rigid the institution the more corrupting it does to an individual's sense of shared humanity. That is, when a person identifies with the abstractness of an institution more than actual living creatures, it's easier, perhaps even mandatory, to deny them any respect or kindness. But the idea that so many people can have their humanity so cancered away, and in a duty that calls for compassion, that's stuff that I have a hard time processing on a gut level. I have that problem with understanding the Holocaust. I've read more than a few books along the years and I really don't think I've understood in a meaningful sense how people get to that point of rationalizing and validating abuse and murder. I can intellectualize it, but I don't understand it.
Re: This Week in Religion
Posted: 09 Sep 2018, 1:12pm
by eumaas
Not sure how one can go from reading the Sermon on the Mount to abusing children.
Not sure how one can go from reading the Sermon on the Mount to abusing children.
Not sure how large chunks of organized Christianity are extrapolated from the foundational texts. I understand how some things got in (the antisemitism was cooked in early, though ironically mostly by Jewish Christians angry at the sense that their community was turning a deaf ear to their conversion attempts), but there are so many facets of modern Christianity completely at odds with anything written in the first few centuries.
Re: This Week in Religion
Posted: 18 Sep 2018, 3:01pm
by BostonBeaneater
Former Republican state senator, 36, is given 15 years in federal prison for paying a boy, 17, to have sex in a motel room and apologizes for living a 'double life of sin'
Confirmed: Half of American evangelicals deserve the hell they assert everyone else is headed for.
Only half?
The other half are dishonest.
Re: This Week in Religion
Posted: 28 Sep 2018, 1:40pm
by revbob
NJ o real surprise most were willing to support Roy Moore and continue to support Trump. Women are still property to these people. Can the rapture come already and take these people away.
Re: This Week in Religion
Posted: 18 Oct 2018, 8:55pm
by eumaas
from a Catholic trinkets catalogue. the wise man is uhh
